We began our 2020 season with the Infinite Recharge game in January and worked over the course of 6 and a half weeks to build a robot for our first competition. We traveled to the Greater Kansas City Regional. We made it to the semifinals and won the Creativity award. We are grateful to have had the opportunity to compete in the 2020 season before Covid hit.
We came back into the 2021 season a little differently with the FIRST Game Changers game. We embraced the challenges presented to us; Infinite Recharge at home where we completed robot challenges and sent in recordings to judges, Innovation challenge where we worked on ways to solve real world problems, and Game Design where we designed our own FRC game. We won the creativity award for our game we created. Covid gave us the opportunity to do something we have always wanted to do, build a swerve drive robot. In July we participated in the Rockford River Robotics offseason competition with this robot. We won this competition and are overjoyed at the opportunity to have competed in person after a year and a half.
Over the summer we’ve kept busy supporting FIRST in our community. We prepared LEGO kits to distribute to all of the FLL teams. To share FIRST with a wider audience, we provided a field for FRC teams to talk about FIRST opportunities during STEM day at the Iowa State fair. During this event, our lead coach, Kenton Swartley was recognized as the Northeast Iowa STEM teacher of the year for his accomplishments. With our new season approaching, we are working to recruit new members and currently have the highest participation in our team’s history. We appreciate all the support we receive and are excited for what the year will bring.
